Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  But it was at this point that Pearson showed he was in the chain of Canadian leaders who had the intuitive genius of a sure instinct for the country’s survival, starting with the fundamental requirement of a French-English double majority on key issues that had existed since the Quebec Act rallied the French Canadians and the American Revolution drove enough British subjects into Canada to make it a loyalist country. If it were just the English asserting their majority in the country on a vital issue, such as Confederation itself, Canada would eventually crack up. Pearson had had a glimpse of what was coming in Quebec, and he knew that the federal government was not equipped to deal with it. New leadership from French Quebec had to be found, and it was. Quebec union leader Jean Marchand, of the Confederation of National Trade Unions, La Presse editor Gérard Pelletier, and the waspy but elegant and completely bilingual Pierre Elliott Trudeau were all recruited as candidates (the last two to safe Montreal constituencies; Marchand had a battle with the Créditistes in Quebec City). This time, there would be no false starts as there had been with Favreau and Lamontagne.

  It was not a serious election, but it did produce the personnel upgrade that would see the country through the next twenty very difficult years. On election night, the Liberals did not gain their majority, though they crept up on it, from 128 MPs to 131, now just two seats short of a majority, while their share of total vote declined slightly, from 41.5 to 40.7 per cent. The Progressive Conservatives gained 4 MPs, increasing from 93 to 97, as their share of the vote also declined slightly, from 32.7 to 32.4 per cent. The NDP had a relatively good election, going from 13.2 per cent to 17.9 per cent and from 17 to 24 MPs. Social Credit finally split, between Caouette’s Créditistes, confined to Quebec, and Robert Thompson’s Social Credit Party. They had been a pantomime horse before but now were just regional splinter parties. Caouette took 4.7 per cent of the total vote and 9 Quebec MPs, and Thompson took 3.7 per cent of the total vote, similar to the totals Solon Low had obtained, and 5 MPs. Their combined total declined, from 19 to 14 MPs and from 11.9 to 8.4 per cent.

  Trudeau, Marchand, and Pelletier were elected and came forward quickly, Marchand straight into government as minister of citizenship and immigration and Trudeau as parliamentary assistant to the prime minister. Walter Gordon, having advised the election, did the honourable thing, as was entirely in character, and resigned from the cabinet.* He remained in Parliament for three years but was a spent force, a gentle, thoughtful, and somewhat prescient man, who by rushing toward his moment of maximum impact, misjudged and missed it, and he could not regain his balance. He deserves to be remembered as an admirable ornament, a prophet of integrity lacking the political gifts needed to govern. His place as minister of finance was taken by the capable Mitchell Sharp. And in the eyes of the Toronto business community, who had been disappointed by Gordon’s reconnaissance on the left, another important addition – returning after an absence of eight years, and now from Toronto – was Robert Winters, one of the bright young men of the St. Laurent government, who had been president of Rio Algom Mines and took Sharp’s place at trade and commerce. It was a decisive changing of the guard in Quebec and Toronto; the future, at least in terms of personalities, was becoming clearer. Pearson’s first impulse was to resign with Gordon, but his colleagues wouldn’t hear of it. The show must go on; there was one more round of the Pearson-Diefenbaker combat to go, but behind that discordant, unserious circus, great drama was approaching.

  Lester Pearson had been persuaded into making an apparently mistaken decision in calling an election but did the right thing for the wrong reasons. In pressing for it, Walter Gordon ended his career in failure but unknowingly created the circumstances for national renewal. The co-chairs of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, André Laurendeau and Davidson Dunton, were correct that an immense crisis was at hand in Quebec. Pearson sensed this, knew there was no one in Ottawa to handle it, and had his doubts that Lesage could hold the province much longer either. Trudeau, forty-six, had been a flippant, underemployed poseur, driving around Montreal on his motorcycle in a German army outfit during the war, promoting miscellaneous labour causes, nuclear disarmament, and even opposing Pearson’s Maple Leaf flag, but he was a very intelligent, very tough, completely bilingual, and very articulate federalist. Jean Marchand had long been associated with a fairly irresponsible labour confederation, but he too was a strong federalist. Gérard Pelletier was a frequently annoying editorial writer, overburdened with affectations of cultural distinction, but he was a powerful federalist advocate also, and was esteemed, as the others were, in the now largely separatist Quebec media. These were new men of great style and presentational flair and rigour, not grey lawyers that the nationalists could dismiss as vendus.

  Pearson did not know them and did not personally recruit them, but he demanded the rounding up of such people, as well as a massive strengthening of the French-Canadian section of the senior federal civil service. In a misconceived election call, he preserved the mystical golden thread of Canadian national development: Quebec would send to Ottawa people who could sell an intensified bicultural federalism to the proverbial two solitudes that composed the country. They had their limitations and would make many mistakes, but Trudeau and the others, some already in place, like Maurice and Jeanne Sauvé, John Turner, and Jean Chrétien, were the people who would save the country. An essentially superfluous election would regenerate Canada and enable the Liberal Party to elevate a leader of even more unlikely provenance than Pearson, St. Laurent, and King. The magic of imperceptible, inexorable Canadian maturation was about to rise to its greatest challenge, as the golden thread would be spun out toward a new millennium.

  Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919–2000), prime minister of Canada 1968–1979, 1980–1984, and René Lévesque (1920–1985), prominent television journalist and Liberal provincial cabinet minister before founding the independentist Parti Québécois in 1967, leader of the opposition 1973–1976 and premier of Quebec 1976–1984. They dominated the federalist-separatist debate in Quebec for nearly twenty years. Trudeau regarded secessionism as verging on treason and attacked it with a severity and fervour unprecedented in Canadian history; Trudeau won their intense struggle, though the battle continued on for another fifteen years.

  * State of the Union message, January 6, 1941.

  * Muggeridge wrote this in several places, but also confirmed it to the author (with amusing elaborations on Duplessis, whom Muggeridge considered the most capable Canadian political leader he had met).

  * The newspaper’s publisher emeritus, Henri Bourassa, Papineau’s grandson, was about to follow William Lyon Mackenzie’s grandson into eternity, which he did on August 31, 1952, on the eve of his eighty-fourth birthday, practically silent for the last eight years after his defeat by Duplessis in the 1944 Quebec election. Le Devoir was now owned by the Archdiocese of Montreal, directed by the forty-eight-year-old Paul-Émile Cardinal Léger, possibly Quebec’s all-time greatest and most generally admired religious leader.

  * From 1941 to 1961, the number of members of religious orders per 100,000 people declined from 1,002 to 860. While this was happening, from 1944 to 1959 gross manufacturing production rose from $3.2 billion to $7.4 billion; manufacturing production per worker rose from $6,600 to $16,000 (in Ontario, from $7,500 to $19,400); and average pay rose from $1,500 to $3,800 (in Ontario, from $1,750 to $4,250). Rates of production increase in primary and secondary industry combined were about 8.5 per cent annually in both provinces throughout Duplessis’s last four terms. From 1944 to 1959, Quebec hydroelectric production rose from 5.85 million horsepower to 11.26 million (in Ontario, with a state-owned system using the province’s credit, it rose from 2.67 million to 7.79 million). Deposits in the province’s Church-connected cooperative savings banks, caisses populaires, rose from $99 million in 1944 to $576 million in 1959. From 1944 to 1959, the number of motor vehicles in Quebec increased from 219,000 to 1,122,000 (in Ontario, from 684,000 to 1,978,000). Paved road milea
ge in Quebec rose in the period from 22,700 to 41,400 (in Ontario, from 56,400 to 68,300), and the Abitibi, Lac Saint-Jean, Mattagami, and Gaspé regions, and both shores of the Lower St. Lawrence, were connected to Quebec City, Montreal, and Ontario for the first time on seriously accessible roads. More than 4,100 schools were built in the period, giving Quebec 8,281 schools for 1,000,959 students and 41,084 teachers by 1959 (Ontario had 7,542 schools, 1,249,673 students, and 43,586 teachers). From 1944 to 1959, the number of enrollees in Quebec’s night schools, trade schools, and craft, technical, and specialized schools increased from 20,400 to 48,500; enrolment at graduate business schools doubled, at fine arts schools tripled, and at polytechnic colleges quintupled. University faculty members increased from 1,522 for 23,493 students to 7,281 for 64,119 students in 1959. University bursaries multiplied eightfold, and Quebec, despite having only 80 per cent of Ontario’s population, had several thousand more university students. The number of hospital beds increased from 22,000 in 1944 to 54,476 in 1959 (in Ontario, from 31,000 to 56,512, a smaller per capita number than in Quebec). From 1944 to 1959, the percentage of Quebec families with refrigerators, automobiles, and their own bathroom increased by, respectively, 23 per cent, 22 per cent, and 54 per cent, so that 92 per cent had a refrigerator, 57 per cent an automobile, and 80 per cent a bathroom. Quebec’s infant mortality rate descended in this time from 175 per cent of Ontario’s to 130 per cent. The life expectancy of Quebeckers increased from more than four years less than that of Ontarians in 1944 to within ten months of that of Ontarians in 1959. The number of deaths per hospital admissions declined in the period from parity with Ontario to 25 per cent fewer than in Ontario in 1959. Between 1944 and 1959, secondary school enrolment of teenagers in Quebec increased from 28 per cent to 68 per cent, or from 40 per cent of Ontario’s level to almost 80 per cent. The student population as a percentage of the total population rose in the 1950s in Quebec, the United States, and Ontario, respectively, by 23.4 per cent, 12.6 per cent, and 15.1 per cent. Most tellingly, per capita personal income, despite the higher birthrate and larger families in Quebec, rose between 1944 and 1959, as a percentage of Ontario’s, from 65 per cent to 87 per cent. (For future contrast, the suicide rate in Quebec rose between 1960 and 1980 from 5 per 100,000 to 17, and expenses of the province as a percentage of gross provincial product rose from 3 per cent in 1944 to only 5 per cent in 1959, to 25 per cent in 1980.)37

  * He summoned the ambassador, stated that France and the principal Western powers were fully aware of the Soviet treachery and that France entirely supported President Kennedy. The ambassador said this probably meant war, and de Gaulle replied, “I doubt it, but if so, we will perish together. Good day, Ambassador.” De Gaulle was a refreshing contrast to Macmillan’s waffling, and his response buttressed his argument that he was always a reliable ally in a crisis, even if his conduct to the “Anglo-Saxons” was normally that of an enemy.

  * Secretary of State of Canada and MP for London, Ontario.

  * Michael Bliss, Right Honourable Men: The Descent of Canadian Politics from Macdonald to Mulroney, Toronto, 1994; John English, The Life of Lester Pearson, vol. II, The Worldly Years, 1949–1972, Toronto, 1992; Bruce Hutchison, Mr. Prime Minister: 1867–1964, Toronto, 1964.

  * There was also an unseemly self-consciousness about a man of so many attainments. In his memoirs, he wrote of his meeting with General Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo in January 1950: “I felt that I ought to fall down and worship, but I do not very readily fall down and worship,” etc. This was a peculiar recollection twenty years later.45

  * He remained as an MP and returned as president of the Privy Council in 1967–1968.

  CHAPTER 9

  Trudeau, Lévesque, and the Quebec Crisis, 1966–2000

  1. Canada-France-Quebec Relations, Charles de Gaulle, and the Victory of Daniel Johnson, 1966–1967

  In the new year, John Diefenbaker’s assault on Lester Pearson’s Quebec ministers began again as it came to light that the justice minister, Lucien Cardin, told a television reporter that George Victor Spencer, a postal clerk suspected of being a Soviet agent, would not be indicted but would be subject to RCMP surveillance for the rest of his life. (This wasn’t as open-ended a matter as it seemed, as he was terminally ill.) Diefenbaker opened up on this, and he and Tommy Douglas’s replacement as NDP leader, David Lewis, demanded an inquiry, as Spencer had not had a chance to defend himself. There was some sympathy for Spencer on the Liberal benches, and Pearson recognized that he might lose a confidence vote on this obscure issue, despite having just been re-elected. He too sympathized with Spencer, and he agreed to an inquiry. By an accidental wiring error, some Conservative MPs could listen in to the Liberal caucus room, and they learned how concerned the government was. Cardin, on March 4, taunted by Diefenbaker, shouted back, “What about Monsignor?” Diefenbaker pressed on, and Cardin was on the verge of resignation; Pearson had lost control of the government again. A number of Quebec ministers, including Jean Marchand, were prepared to resign also. As Ernest Lapointe and Arthur Cardin (no relation to Lucien) had done in the case of Jacques Bureau during the customs scandal forty years before, the French-Canadian ministers locked arms together. By a narrow margin, Lucien Cardin resolved to remain, and the crisis passed, but “Monsignor,” who proved to be the call girl Gerda Munsinger, who had had a relationship with one of Diefenbaker’s ministers, whose name Cardin had mispronounced and whom he mistakenly believed was dead, became a subject of curiosity to Pearson, and he acted, in conversation with Diefenbaker, as if she were an ace up the government’s sleeve. Cardin babbled garrulously to the press about the “late Olga Monsignor,” as he called the live Gerda Munsinger, on March 10. This created a tremendous buzz, and an enterprising Toronto Star reporter, Robert Reguly, found Frau Munsinger working in a Munich bar. She quickly revealed that her chief contact in the Conservative government had been Pierre Sévigny, Diefenbaker’s associate minister of national defence. A Royal Commission chaired by Chief Justice Wishart Spence was established, and while it vastly entertained Canadians, and lightly criticized Diefenbaker and Davie Fulton for insufficient vigilance, it found no security breach. In a sense, Cardin had at least held his own with Diefenbaker, unlike Guy Favreau, Maurice Lamontagne, and René Tremblay. It was a very shabby business, and Parliament plumbed rare depths of absurd and unruly debate.

  Canada’s relations with the United States were strained through most of the Pearson term after a good start with Kennedy. The U.S. president for all but the first seven months was the flamboyant but rather crude Texan veteran of Congress Lyndon B. Johnson, fabled leader of the Senate who had succeeded on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Pearson had kept somewhat in touch with what was happening in Vietnam, partly through Canada’s role on the practically irrelevant International Control Commission, and partly through his many diplomatic contacts in the United States and other countries. All Pearson’s information was that the condition of South Vietnam was eroding quickly, and in a speech at Temple University in Philadelphia on April 2, 1965, just two weeks after Johnson had begun to commit U.S. ground forces to combat in South Vietnam, Pearson publicly suggested there be a pause in bombing. (The use of ground forces in South Vietnam was against the advice of President Truman, President Eisenhower, and General MacArthur, all of whom regarded the country as porous and not worth the cost of rescuing it from an advanced communist insurgency heavily supported by the Soviet Union and China.) Johnson was incensed and raved at Pearson at the presidential retreat at Camp David. In their previous meeting, at the LBJ Ranch in Texas, Pearson had been offended by Johnson’s coarseness and bellicosity, and by mannerisms such as interrupting his driving tour of the estate to urinate at the roadside. (By contrast, Britain’s Yorkshire prime minister Harold Wilson and West Germany’s Bavarian chancellor, Ludwig Erhard, found Johnson’s informality refreshing.) Paul Martin had threatened to resign if Pearson gave the speech in Philadelphia, but he did not. The Canadian perspect
ive was correct in that the United States was embarking on an unpromising endeavour, but it was mistaken in so far as it imagined that there were any alternatives to fighting it out successfully or abandoning Indochina completely. Johnson had asked for Canadian good offices in carrying messages of threats and rewards to Hanoi, in North Vietnam, in 1964, and Canadian diplomat Blair Seaborn did so, but reported that Hanoi had no interest in negotiating. Martin, as part of his ramp-up to the succession to Pearson, sent Chester Ronning, the leftist son of missionaries in China and severe critic of U.S. policy, on a fact-finding mission to Hanoi, despite Pearson’s realistic pessimism that much would come of it, and nothing did.

  If the United States had been serious about Indochina, it should have made the fight as soon as the French conceded the colonial issue, when it would have had serious allies and before Ho Chi Minh had turned the North into a robotic warrior state. Eisenhower judged it not worth such an effort but fatefully guaranteed South Vietnam, on the theory that it could be protected. Johnson made war in increments, raising and lowering the level of bombing and ignoring the advice of MacArthur and Eisenhower that if he was going to fight the war, he would have to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and stop the flow of North Vietnamese soldiers and supplies to the South. He never did, and Ho just kept feeding the slaughter, oblivious to his casualties. Johnson came for a few hours to the world’s fair site in Montreal in June 1967, and he and Pearson never met again after that.